Joost de Valk announced on the Yoast blog yesterday that they’re pre-releasing a commercial version of the highly popular WordPress SEO plugin. The plugin will come with additional features with the full release, but for now it’s an option for additional support.
The pricing model follows similar lines to Yoast’s other commercial add-ons like the Video SEO plugin. Customers can purchase single site upgrades and support licensing for $89 per year, five site licensing for $169, or up to twenty sites for $329 per year.
New features in WordPress SEO
The two announced features to be included in the commercial version are Google Webmaster Tools integration and redirect functionality.
As Joost notes in the post, most smart-redirect plugins are generally awful. I’ve personally seen many infinite loops created by them. I hope he improves that space; however, I’m skeptical of just about any redirect solution that tries to predict proper redirects.
When I asked him about it, he assured me they were doing a ton of work to minimize bloat and offer clever redirect functionality that other plugins are not currently using. Joost said that it has been a surprising challenge to code so far, but that he’s confident how it’s development is progressing. I look forward to seeing the finished product.
For the Google Webmaster Tools integration, the plugin will be able to bring in data from Webmaster Tools to track crawl errors. I would like this very much, as I don’t particularly spend much time in that tool itself.
These are likely the first of many future features for the commercial version of WordPress SEO. I’m particularly interested to see what percentage of future features go into the commercial version, versus the already feature-rich free version. Joost told me when we talked that many features that will go into the commercial version will be specifically geared toward SEO professionals, but that they haven’t yet created a complete roadmap for which new features will go into the free version versus the commercial one.
What took so long?
The biggest alternative SEO plugin for WordPress, All in One SEO, has had a commercial version available for quite some time now. I’m honestly surprised it took this long for Joost to offer commercial support and additional features for the base-plugin. Based on what I can tell, his add-ons have been quite popular. So I asked him, “why now?”
We didn’t actually dare to pull the trigger on a “premium version” up till now because we knew we had to be able to handle the support. The premium extensions have been good in that regard as they’ve allowed us to scale and to figure out which support process works for us. In the year since the release of our first premium extension, Video SEO, we’ve gone from 3 to 8 people, and I think we’re ready now.
He noted that they are ready immediately to have at least one or two people support the commercial plugins full time. I look forward to seeing how the product grows and seeing how his company is able to scale long term with it.
I won’t be buying this plugin, based on this article. In fact, the reason I read this article was because I saw the teaser and thought “what could they do to make me pay for Yoast” and sure enough NOTHING. First of all. The plugin already has redirect access– it allows you to directly edit the .htaccess file from the Yoast plugin. They will make it easier than typing “redirect 301 /old/ /new”??? If they are going to make this simple solution into something more simple– the author is right. Endless redirects are typical.
And then they are going to bloat my WP by connecting and talking to Google? Really?
This should be the free version, and they should charge for the less-bloated “developers” version. I’d pay for this, but only to keep it off my site.
SEO by Yoast is most useful plugin i have ever used.
Nothing great to say… the free version is more than enough… I think he should include more premium and unique features to the commercial version.
The thing many plugin authors are forgetting, is that so many people use their plugins because of how good and/or lightweight they are currently – adding additional and un-needed functionality/features can be complete overkill, and will no doubt steer certain people away.
In fact I have been using AIOSP for a very long time, on over 40 WP-powered sites. Since AISOP started bloating it out however (adding Google authorship/ additional fields etc), I took the plunge and switched to Yoast SEO.
Why did I not need these features?
1. I have my own functionality plugin or theme function to cover such tasks. Or in some cases…
2. The site owner already has a plugin for those tasks that works just fine.
It took me the best part of a 6 weeks to make the changeover from AIOSP to Yoast SEO. I’m now dreading having to do this all over again in the near future.
It remains clear that not all of us want these additional ‘features’, so why aren’t plugin authors listening, and playing this a different way?
The way I talk of is not just to keep the end-users happy, but also to benefit the authors in terms of £revenue.
The solution? ADD-ONS!
Add-ons represent the best of both worlds, for both end-user AND the plugin authors.
Will plugin authors take note? Probably not.
All in one SEO Plugin i better than yoast now.But i have built in yoast plugin in my theme.
my client purchased this plug-in on my advice and is yet to see it. Unfortunately I have asked multiple times and been ignored can you please tell me if this is actually going to be coming out as you said that the latest October 30th I would appreciate an update
Google last it is somewhere all most interested in their earnings on pages with higher pagerank and it is difficult to break through to new domains.
Yoast is such plugin which is providing completely users friendly interference to the website owners for optimization of his website. The premium or commercial version of Yoast plugin has some more features and have great resulted for the SEO point of view. You discuss the review about premium version comprehensively in the post which allow readers to experience this paid plugin.
it is really interesting to hear about the new professional version of yoast plugin with add on features like Google webmaster integration and that too in a very little price. this plugin will go a long way in increasing the rankings of the urls using it
I think this model of plugin: Free with Premium add-ons is a sound model. I understand the reluctance to pull the trigger on premium with a plugin like Yoast, which is one of the most popular ones out there, because that means comitting to support.
Integrating with Google Webmaster Tools could be interesting. I know I don’t check 404s nearly enough, and having that right there might help.
Thanks for this! You’ve helped me delay the dreaded conversion to Genesis for just a little while longer. 🙂
I’m happy to see a response to the support problems that Yoast has had in the past. At least now there are options for those who have issues, even if it comes at a cost.
yost this is a big scam defrauded my visits I saw an 80% drop after putting as Yoast plugin, I buy seopremium release and nothing has changed
it is a real fraud
Thierry, the chances of your traffic dropping because of Yoast’s plugin are pretty much nonexistent. You should check into other issues, such as whether you are distributing malware or inspect what kind of content you are posting.
Actually, I had a couple of clients who did lose ranking, because of this plugin. When you install this plugin, by default, the newer version of Yoast (non-paid and paid) has the “remove stopwords from posts” option checked by default. (WTF?!?) On two client websites, and I am still investigating why- it removed stopwords from posts that were already made. All those posts became 404 errors and any link juice they had was gone. Like I said, it happened with two client sites, but there have several upgrades to the plugin since then and I haven’t been able to duplicate it. But I did see it happen. Once the clients removed the stupid “stop words” feature, they went back and re-named all of their posts to their previous hyperlinks and everything popped back up.
Nice tool. I have used also Yoast for my site. I was also looking for this kind of post to be more familiar with Yoast. You can add another seo tools serplab.co.uk to check the result of Google SERP of any website. I have used many tools to check my site’s health in Google SERP. But it is totally free better than any premium seo tools.
I then upgraded version of any service is always a great thing to apply and Yoast is really a great SEO plugin that helps us to manage the site according to the SEO we do for it. there are so many people searching and waiting for the new upgrades for this plugin and now they are happy fond out their favorite plugin here. Same like this most of the people love to use the smartdns services that are great for them and to provide them a great chance to visit the sites that is unable for them to visit.
Free version of yoast seo is a nice plugin. For paid plugin i would prefer seopressor.
Nice…!!!
visit http://www.searchlaboratory.com/blog/2013/12/5-terrible-seo-sales-emails/#comment-153182 for keyword research tool.
niche plugin ty for shring,
Would this commercial be useful for users long-term? I mean, what exactly are the changes/upgrades? If it does what free SEO plug-ins does, it doesn’t make sense shedding 89 bucks for that.